Police Power: The Biopolitical State Apparatus and Differential Interpellations

Abstract

This essay revisits Althusser’s work on ideology and the state in light of the growing prominence of police power. It interrogates the figure of the cop in Althusser’s ISAs essay—and in the longer manuscript from which it was extracted—as a symptom of the instability of the ideology/violence binary that structures Althusser’s classification of state apparatuses, while tracing its implications for Althusser’s difficulty in accounting for the constitution of different subjects. Building on Foucault’s work on the police and putting Althusser and Foucault in conversation, the essay proposes an amendment to Althusser with the idea of the police as a Biopolitical State Apparatus that is responsible for the differential interpellation of subjects.

Key Words:

• Ideology
• Interpellation
• Policing
• Race
• Subjectivity

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for deeply insightful and generous comments on earlier versions of this essay by Warren Montag, Judith Butler, Massimiliano Tomba, Thomas Alkemeyer, Ruth Sonderegger, Zahid Chaudhary, Robyn Marasco, and Edgar Illas. Its remaining shortcomings are mine only.

Notes

1 Important contributions have been made to connect policing and crime to a Marxist theory of the state. See, especially, Hall et al. (1978), Scraton (1987), and more recently, Neocleous (2002).

2 Social reproduction, as utilized extensively by feminists, has gained a different meaning from that in Althusser’s work or in Marxist theorization more generally. According to the feminist iteration of the term, social reproduction denotes biological reproduction and the work of maintaining daily life, characterized by a gendered division of labor, inequality based on sexual difference, and patriarchal domination. Laslett and Brenner (1989, 383) have proposed the term “societal reproduction” to denote the Marxist usage, indicating “the perpetuation of modes of production and the structures of class inequality inscribed within them” while reserving “social reproduction” for feminism’s broader understanding that includes “the work of maintaining existing life and the next generation” while it also examines the “reproduction of systems of gender inequality” in forms that are not reducible to class inequality. In this essay, I retain the usage of “social reproduction” in the Althusserian sense (which Laslett and Brenner present more narrowly), denoting the training and comportment required for the reproduction of social relations as a whole.

3 See, for example, prominent and polemical contributions to the critique by E. P. Thompson (2008), Glucksmann (1972), and Callinicos (1976).

4 Althusser’s theory is also unclear on how to theorize the complexity of the ideological commitments of individual subjects, commitments that are themselves often marked with internal contradictions. On this, see Bargu (2015).

5 I do not engage with Rancière (1998) as an interlocutor in this essay even though the idea of the police is central to his thought. For Rancière, the police refers to an order that marks the visible from the invisible, speech from noise, distinguishing those who are part of the order from those who have no part. Rancière’s theory is built on the strong opposition between police and politics, in which politics is the interruption of the police order and a resistance to it. The police functions as a metaphor that is made coterminous with the whole exclusion-based social formation. As a result, the generalization of the police to denote the entirety of the statist order loses the specificity of the police that I aim to delineate in this essay.

6 Althusser (1971, 127–86) is reproduced in Althusser (2014, 232–72), which will be the text used in this essay.

7 Also, see Balibar (2015).

8 Montag (2017, 63–8) calls attention to how the personification of the Subject in the figure of the police was admittedly exacerbated with the Brewster translation in which the adjectival use of the police (interpellation policière) is rendered into a noun form: the “policeman’s practice of hailing” (Althusser 2014, 264n18). This translation is amended in the Goshgarian version of the longer manuscript in which the term used is “police practice of hailing” or “police hailing” (190n24). For the duality of the meaning of interpellation in the sense of police interrogation and as forms of informal hailing, see Fassin (2013, 1–12).

9 According to Butler (1997, 32), this violence is tied to the place of the voice, modeled after the divine power of naming: “The voice is implicated in a notion of sovereign power, power figured as emanating from a subject, activated in a voice, whose effects appear to be the magical effects of that voice.”

10 For Butler, since Althusser’s primary model for interpellation is a theological one, the determining feature for all interpellations is guilt. This interpellation is repressive because it is accusatory, as it involves the presumption or suspicion of guilt on the part of the one hailed, the implication of which, as Althusser puts it, assigns the one hailed the task of proving one’s “innocence” so that one can be “let go.” At the same time, “as a prior and essential condition of the formation of the subject, there is a certain readiness to be compelled by the authoritative interpellation, a readiness that suggests that one is, as it were, already in a binding relation to the divine voice before one succumbs to its call” (Butler 1995, 16). This is guilt. It is unclear whether this element is an aspect of every hail or only the police hail, but Butler (1997, 32) seems to suggest its universal quality when she argues that subjection-subjectivation requires constantly being “in the process of acquitting oneself of the accusation of guilt.”

11 Cf., Elden (2003), who argues that the “quarantine” rather than the panopticon is a better model for the police.

12 Montag (2013, 165) draws on this parallel to suggest that Foucault is able to overcome the remnants of a Cartesian subjectivity that still occasions the characterization of Althusser’s scene of interpellation as a “drama of recognition”: i.e., as a “subjective process, unfolding entirely within the realm of consciousness or intersubjectivity.” Montag contends that Foucault manages to substitute the personification in the Althusserian interpellation, which is marked by the figure of the Subject, with the impersonality and silence of a panoptic structure: “As if to speak out would compromise its anonymity, power does not call out, call upon, or address; instead, it watches, supervises, and carries out surveillance” (169).

13 Along these lines, Judith Butler maintains that the policeman’s hail is enabled through the “force of reiterated convention.” As a practice that is indifferent to the specific person who does the hailing, the police hail “‘works’ in part because of the citational dimension of the speech act, the historicity of convention that exceeds and enables the moment of its enunciation” (1997, 33).

14 It should be noted that the Biopolitical State Apparatus can be expanded in its conception to include other institutions, such as the family, medicine, and psychiatry, and so on, insofar as these institutions are permeated by policing in the sense that is being employed here.